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Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Moscow, June 29, Interfax - The Russian Orthodox Church has appealed to
all Russian advocates of the American model of governance, asking them
to think twice about the consequences of the United States' decision to
legalize same-sex "marriages".

"The people who are into 'democracy the American way' and trying to
reconcile it with traditional values need to think hard after this
decision," the head of the Synodal Department for Church and Society
Relations Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin told Interfax-Religion.
He pointed out to the kind of values that one is "trying to bring along with the U.S. social and political model."
"You might not be told that they want to force you to adopt such a
godless and sinful thing as same-sex marriages. Remember: in reality
they want to take your right to live according to the faith, take your
soul, take your opportunity to build the life of your society and your
state according to the eternal and invariable God-given moral laws," the
priest said.
He said the thing he was most concerned about in this particular case is
that the U.S. government is trying "to impose its anti-natural and
post-human view on marriage on other countries."

The Russian Church representative recalled that one of these days U.S.
Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who spoke on behalf of the
majority of judges who made these decisions, said that same-sex couples
were seeking to achieve same legal attitudes towards their union as
heterosexual ones. The judge also claimed that the nature of marriage
consists in the following: two people together can obtain freedoms, in
particular, the freedom of expression, privacy and spirituality,
regardless of their sexual orientation.

"Such attitude towards marriage is more than surprising. Marriage is not
just a legal construct, it is not just a place where one exercises
legal rights," the priest said.

He pointed out that "marriage has a certain nature, it is created by
God, primarily, not as a legal space for the exercise of rights but a
place where man and woman in the union of love give life to children and
bring them up."

"Marriage is a constant created by God and laid down in the human
nature. And as the Orthodox commentator Sergey Khudiyev rightly put it,
trying to change it with a legal decision is the same as trying to
change the laws of nature with such a decision," the priest said.

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